President elect Barack Obama’s embrace of online video and social networking may have propelled him to victory, but unless he’s careful, his administration could be brought down by the same sloppy security problems that have plagued MySpace, Facebook, and dozens of other Web 2.0 properties.

In 2007, the Mozilla Foundation received 88 per cent of its revenue from a certain Mountain View sugar daddy. And thanks to its longstanding Google dependence, the organization is facing an IRS audit and questions over its tax exempt status.

Intel is pumping up its virility through proxies like Michael Dell reminding us of an 80-core chip future. It's impressive, but Intel is a company obsessed to distraction with Moore's Law. It's like watching a crack addict do anything to get the next hit, a doubling of processor performance every 18 months, whatever it takes, in Intel's case.

Asus pretty much started the whole Small, Cheap Computer ball rolling with its first Eee PC just over a year ago. But now there are hundreds of the darn things, from every manufacturer imaginable, so how does Asus ensure it stays at the forefront of the market?

America's Lawrence Livermore nuclear bomb lab has teamed up with open-source computing heavyweights to build the next generation of Linux superclusters, ultimately scaling into the petaflop range. The project has been dubbed "Hyperion".

Scientists are pondering the possible source of an "unexpected surplus of cosmic ray electrons at very high energy", and suggest they're either pouring out of an exotic object relatively close to Earth or represent the fall-out from the annihilation of theoretical particles comprising dark matter.

The BBC has quite righty done a U-turn on its shock decision to can the Top of the Pops Xmas special, and viewers will now be able to enjoy Fearne Cotton and Reggie Yates presenting the traditional count-down to the Yule number one.

Juicy snippets regarding the upcoming downloadable content (DLC) for Grand Theft Auto: IV have emerged online, including the add-on’s basic storyline, a profile of the central character and the title’s potential release date.

Australians could face 'pay as you dump' charges as part of a Toilet Tax. It's all in the name of "sustainability" - and part of a growing eco-movement to replace flushing conveniences with smelly and unhealthy inconvenience.

Pope Benedict predicted the current economic apocolypse back in 1985, an Italian politician has declared, suggesting that the Vatican may be the one global institution likely to make a killing out of Mammon's downfall.

The times, they may be changing on the internet, but if our Parliament has anything to do with it, that change is unlikely to be for the better. The problem is that far too many MPs not only don’t get it when it comes to the net, they actively bask in their ignorance of new technology.

Toughened mobiles for building site workers are nothing new, but most lack any juicy features like a camera or 3G. So Nokia’s created what’s possibly the 'ardest fully-featured mobile yet: the Bruce Lee edition N96.

Logitech's Squeezebox Duet network music player doesn't really have any faults but if you absolutely had to come up with an Achilles' Heel it would be the need for an amplified stereo system for it to play through. Not an issue if you only want music in one room, but more of a problem if you want tunes all around the house.

Ofcom has published the third of their annual reports comparing the UK digital communications industry to those found in nearby countries, and concludes that we're the most advanced - though the Irish make more mobile calls and the Americans watch more TV.

Following on from the discussion of legacy systems and platforms occurring as part of our platform optimisation workshop here, we're trying to work out the best way to avoid having your expensive IT systems degrading to legacy status. So, if you have a couple of spare minutes, let's have your views on this in our mini-poll below:

Bandwidth-starved military spyplane chiefs are resorting to the use of humans as airborne data-processing nodes, according to reports. Difficulties in deployment of unmanned robot surveillance craft have led to the purchase of basic civilian planes for use in intelligence work above Iraq and Afghanistan.

Put yourself in these hypothetical shoes for a moment. My goal is to make as much money as possible by doing as little work as possible. I have no creative talent except for generating and recycling marketing buzzwords. I have no technical knowledge or ability - but I can get my head around a Twitter feed. It doesn't sound promising, but you'll want in, I promise.

300,000 UK T-Mobile customers had a quiet morning as they were unable to make or receive calls thanks to a database snafu that forced the operator to restore from backups - a process which is still in progress.

‘My dog ate it’, ‘I left it on the bus’, and ‘someone stole it’ – they were the classic excuses in our day for not handing in homework. But modern youth are increasingly blaming absent homework on technology, a survey’s revealed.

Endeavour mission specialists Shane Kimbrough and Heide Stefanyshyn-Piper are getting ready for the second mission STS-126 spacewalk outside the International Space Station this afternoon, scheduled to get under way at 18:45 GMT.

When it comes to parallel supercomputing, and indeed any kind of parallel processing, the hardware is the easy part. The systems software, including a tuned software stack and middleware for managing data, visualization applications for turning datasets into something human beings can use to make decisions or understand some phenomenon, is a bit trickier.

The New Xbox Experience (NXE) has barely been out for 24 hours, but gamers have already claimed that it’s messing with their consoles. Some have even said the update’s caused the dreaded Red Ring of Death (RRoD) to rear its ugly head once more.

Architectures can change quickly in the supercomputing space, and slow-moving vendors can get left behind or at least find themselves out of step with the next big wave of sales in the HPC area. This has happened in the past with Silicon Graphics, and the company is determined to not let it happen again.

When you are recovering from a long period of hard times and light appears at the end of the tunnel and gets closer and closer until you emerge into glorious daylight, you get a spring in your step and start making plans. Now you're back on your feet, the world becomes an oyster again, and you go off in different directions pursuing pearls. That's the feeling I get talking to Hitachi GST.

PayPal, the online payment service that is a major target of phishers, has been caught sending customer emails that confuse its own login page with a third-party landing site that offers spyware protection and a bevy of other products.

While supercomputer maker Silicon Graphics was showing off its existing Altix lines of Xeon and Itanium servers at the SC08 supercomputing show in Austin, Texas, this week, the most interesting thing the company touted was not yet a real computer, but a concept system, called Molecule.

If you were looking for some good news out of Dell today as it reported its fiscal 2009 third quarter financial results, you will probably be disappointed. But not as much as you might think. That's good news of a sort considering the miserable week the global economy is having.